Don’t Look at Their Faces
Short post tonight because I’m getting on a plane tomorrow. Tonight is just about pure impact from the strength of a vocal performance. This is one of my favorite ways to analyze music, because it’s all about what it makes me feel. Strip away the lyrics, the instrumentation, the outfits worn in the music video, the singer’s reputation, and everything else about them and the song, and just focus on the singing and how it makes you feel.
Some singers have more powerful voices than others, of course. So let’s take a song that is marginally written from the perspective of a sex worker not really digging her work. But it’s not about that. It’s also a pretty slow song with no interesting music, little originality, and a pretty standard Mark Knopfler structure.
The song, of course, is Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” (1984), on the album of the same name. After the runaway success of the single “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” widely considered Tina’s comeback single, which swept the Grammy awards that year, she needed to release another single. Private Dancer is an interesting album. It’s a great listen and deserves its place in the pop oeuvre and is likely the greatest comeback album of all time. But thematically, it’s all over the place.
I’ll make the argument that “Private Dancer,” the song, is much greater than the sum of its parts. One could easily pass it off as a mid-80s silly slow jam. But what makes it incredible is simple: Tina Turner’s vocal performance. Most of the song is done in Tina’s signature raspy contralto, almost talk-sung. But when she gets to the second chorus: “I’m your private dancer / A dancer for money / I’ll do what you want me to do / I’m your private dancer / A dancer for money / And any old music will do” she does something extraordinary and repeats the chorus again immediately, in the greatest, grandest voice she has. It leads into a bridge where she continues this huge, booming voice that takes control of every aspect of the song. It has stuck with me since the very first time I heard the song, many years ago. Tina Turner’s best vocal performances don’t just live on recordings; they live in my brain, in my body, and in my soul. It is a rare thing, indeed, that we have someone on this planet who can singlehandedly change humanity. I love and miss you, Tina.